I remember Joe Batton (Golf Pro), at the Boiling Spring Lakes Golf Course in NC, selling Stewart sandwiches when I worked there as a kid in the early 70’s.
We had one at the lake my parents were part owner of in the 1970s, selling them at the snack bar. I was too young at the time to work the snack bar, mostly running messages from the phone at the bar to the various life guards.
The Cohen Family, my aunt and uncle, of New Jersy owned a division of the Stewart Sandwich distribution company and my dad was the president. My brother, sister and I worked summers selling those sandwiches. It was a big operation. Loved those sandwiches!
This has got to be a record for new posters. A lot of people must have loved those sandwiches.
It was awesome reading all the posts regarding Stewart Sandwiches.
I had the pleasure of experiencing Stewart Sandwiches at the private school I attended from 1977-1985. Since we didn’t have a cafeteria at the school, we ate lunches in our classrooms and our teachers took daily Stewart Sandwich and weekly Bircherd (?) milk orders. Typically we had hamburgers on Tuesdays, cheese pizzas on Wednesdays and Thursdays were sometimes hot dogs one year and bean burritos the following year. Unfortunately I was not a lucky regular “hot lunch” kid, as my mom usually packed my lunch. I was sooo jealous of these kids and my mouth watered whenever lunch rolled around and the tray full of hot sandwiches was brought in from an awaiting rolling cart in the class hallway. If I was lucky enough to scrape together allowance money, I treated myself to a sandwich. Those were the best days!!
As mentioned in other posts, I think Stewart Sandwiches is now Deli Express.
Stewart In-fra-red started out as a national franchise in the early 50’s. I know that there were franchises in Atlanta, Miami, Norfolk, Birmingham, Louisville, Chicago, Jacksonville, Indianapolis to name a few. In the 60’s and early 70’s the norfolk franchise started buying up the other franchises and got into legal problems when they violated their franchise agreement.
I worked there as a teenager, doing everything from cleaning the equipment including the ovens and making sandwiches. During my first years of college I drove a truck route and delivered sandwiches, pizzas and school lunches during the summer break.
The celophane was a high temperature product that was originally supplied as bags but in the 60’s they started using a machine that made a tube that heat sealed the seam and both ends. In fra red had an advantage over microwve (microwave was not invented yet) but it actually toasted the bread.
The memories!
The meat pies you get in every roadhouse in Australia are wrapped in cellophane, too, and that withstands the heat of the ovens.
Although this topic is a few years old, I’m going to move it to CS for you.
Christ, it almost looks like a little bit too elaborate viral campaign for Stewart sandwiches.
10-4 - In the late '70s/early 80’s I was a kid running around (Driving) … an older friend of mine ran a mom/pop convenience store and sold a ton of Stewart sandwiches. THey were in cellophane and heated up in a giant “easy-bake” oven – a pre-cursor to a microwave, it literally had some kind of light bulbs to make the heat. The cellophane would get a little crispy and brown like the sandwich.
A couple of the sandwiches were delicious - there was a soyburger cheeseburger that if you heated it just right you’d get this great toasted bun and bubbly cheese. There was also a “deluxe” that was like a ham/cheese thing - again great toasty bun. Also a packaged pizza slice that was also very good. Probably some others but those were my favorites - I could get them with a coke for around a buck ! THe ‘deluxe’ was a little more.
Like most everything else good - these were ruined by company management. They moved away from the light bulb oven to the microwave (because it was faster), and came out with a new line-up that pretty much just tasted like rotten meat and soggy microwave bun. The original sandwiches took around 5 minutes to heat up - the microwave ones of course were under a minute.
I can remember the crispy bun and flavor like it was yesterday. I bet if someone would re-invigorate the product line it would go.
B.M
Wow, I had totally forgotten these!
Yes - they were everywhere when I was a kid in Illinois. I can remember those slightly burned cellophane wrappers and the bland food inside that was just perfect if your taste palette considered Spaghetti-O’s gourmet pasta.
As a kid, they were perfect junk food pre-McDonald’s and other fast food/junk food chains.
If I recall, it was always a hit-or-miss regarding which sandwiches they might have; sometimes it was a choice of ham and American cheese or nothin’.
You often got the feeling that sandwich was prepared 4 months prior to you eating it.
First post!!!
Found you folks seeking information about my beloved longed-for long gone heat-and-eat sandwich from the 1970s and 1980s.
Lengthy research, Web seeking, etc. slowly led to my belief my longed-for incredible edible was a Stewart (possibly other makers since I ate similar sandwiches nation-wide) with the name(s) of the sandwich possibly Wrangler and/or Longhorn with the possibility other names were used, depending upon location
If anybody has information, an opinion…anything I encourage you to follow the link to the exact blog post at WordPress that covers this topic and feel free to add ANY data, opinion, belief… anything that assists in my chasing info regarding the sandwich that sustained me, made my liver quiver with unadulterated delight.
Thanks in advance for any assistance given!!!
Just ran across this “multi year” thread. When I was in High School in the mid 70’s, our school opted out of the nutrition based hot lunch program and brought in the Stewart Sandwich exclusively. It is all we had to eat every day for three years ! I used to love the Chuckwagon and their Cheese (?:dubious:) burger. We since have joked that they must have contained traces of cocaine because you could never get enough of them ! :eek:
Today the closest thing I have found to ease my craving is the “Holideli” line of sandwiches at the Holiday Station Stores in the northern part of the US midwest. Mmmmmmmm ! 
Thanks for the memories everyone ! 
We had one of the Stewart Sandwich ovens in the small country store in Bluff City , TN during the 1980’s. I remember the Sandwiches were actually pretty good and often wondered if they were still around. We kept them in the cooler and when the customer wanted them they could just put them in the oven and heat them up, a pretty good seller if I remember correctly. Seems like an insiginifiant think at the time but some things just stand out later in life when you remember them.
I worked for stewart sandwiches as a kid fixing and cleaning there ovens and pizza ovens and later microwaves…I also worked on the doboy wraping machine that packaged the samdwiched back in the late 70,s early 80,s. I thought that the sandwiches were realy good sence I got to go into the production room and make my own. I know the the company that I worked for used only the best products. Sence I worked on the ovens, I found out the best ways to cook the products because if it didn,t work out I could always go back and try again and after experimeting I got preaty good at cooking them.
LOL. “Look at me! I’m sexy! I’m a sexy boy! DING DONG! DING DONG!”
Man, I loved 'em. When I was a kid in the mid 60s, our corner drug store sold them. The burgers were 30 cents and my pal John and I would split one. We were about 11yrs old. The old lady at the counter would take a butter knife and cut it in two for us.
Every bar and grocery store sold them in the 60s and 70s. In the early 70s I was in college and working as a parking lot attendant in downtown Mpls. Almost all office buildings had little cigar/gum/newspaper kiosks in the lobby in those days…usually run by blind people, for some reason. And they all had the those tasty Infra-Red sandwiches! Every payday, I’d spring for the Stewart Chuckwagon…a hamburger/steak type thing with onions on it and a pat of butter (or somthing). I can smell it to this day.
Yea, I used to run across the street to Hay-Lo’s store. They had a whole quarter end of a reach down circa 60’s , meat cooler, filled with Stewart and later, off-brand, prepared burritos and sandwiches. I was right oi the cusp, I saw the changeover from infrared to microwave in the late seventies, to early eighties. I thought their cheeseburgers were the strangest tasting things I had ever eaten. They were quite unusually flavored from the early plastics high temp steaming, and a MSG, liquid smoke flavor. The cheese was uite substandard. They had some decent things like the BBq pork. The hot Ham and cheese, Nope.
I think later they had Heroes.